Green Goddess Soup Recipe
Green Goddess Soup is a versatile soup that relies more on imagination and experimentation than on a strict recipe. You can alter it according to your taste and what you have available at the time.
As many ingredients as possible should be foraged or harvested from your garden. This soup is about getting back into touch with nature and recognizing where our food comes from. If you can't pick wild food or grow your own, then try to buy local and/or organic produce if possible. You will want to use as many in season items as possibly, so the contents can vary slightly depending on the time of year.
Begin your soup by sauting your base bulk ingredients and some of your spices. A potato or two, chopped, makes a good filling addition to begin any soup, but you can use other root vegetables if you prefer. Swede and parsnips are both good main-stream alternatives, but you can also eat the roots of dandelions and stinging nettles. Or you can use a lesser known alternative like the Jerusalem artichoke. Use any combination of these vegetables depending on what you have.
With the root vegetable, you want to sweat down a chopped onion and a clove of garlic. If you have them available, you can use wild onions and wild garlic (both the bulbs and shoots are edible on the wild plants), or you can use chives or leeks (both of which are very easy to grow yourself). Also add tougher herbs at this point, such as chopped rosemary (domesticated or wild variety)you can eat the needle-like leaves and the flowers, but discard the woody stalk. Cook them gently with a knob of butter until soft (if you have an aversion to butter, you can use an oil, such as olive or pumpkin seed oil).
When those are mostly cooked, you want to add any other ingredients that need cooking. Green Goddess Soup is primarily made with stinging nettle leaves, but you can add any other green vegetable that you want. If you have asparagus or wild asparagus, hop shoots, peas, broccoli (remember to use the stalks and leaves as well as the florets), or green beans, then you can chop them and add them in. Part cook with the root vegetables, onion, and garlic.
Next, you want to stuff as many stinging nettle leaves into the pan as you possibly can. Cram then in because they will shrink up once the start to cook. You can also add other leaves at this point, such as dandelion leaves, primrose leaves, rocket (standard or wild), watercress, etc.
Cover with just enough vegetable stock to cover all of the leaves. Home-made stock is the best, but if you don't have vegetable stock available, you can cover with water and then add a crumbled stock cube. Simmer for about ten minutes. While simmering, you can add a great flavour by dangling in a tea bag. Mint teas (particularly mint & eucalyptus or mint & nettle varieties) give a fresh flavour; fennel teas give a surprising sweet tang that aids digestion.
You can flavour it according to your taste. Add as much salt and pepper as you want, and add finely chopped fresh spices (use whatever fresh herbs you have available; I like to use thyme, oregano, and basil). Taste it and keep adding bits according to how it tastes to you. Puree it to the desired consistency (I like mine smooth, and find using a hand blender works the best).
Serve with fresh bread and enjoy.